Abstract
Reduction by-catch of commercial fishing are become major concern, especially prawn trawl fisheries. By-catch reduction device developed to address that issue. However, there were trade-off problems regarding the implementation the BRD in trawl fisheries that is the effectiveness of the BRD. The performance of BRD was questionable on the effectiveness in term of reduction the by-catch and maintenance amount of target catch. This essay examines the performance of Jones-Davis type BRD to reduce by-catch and its impact to prawn catch in Cleveland Bay. An experimental fishing has been conducted (control-net and BRD-net; Pair-trawl method) to assess the effectiveness of by-catch reduction which examined with Wilcoxon Rank Test. The result shows that trawl equipped by BRD significantly reduce by-catch by 22.2% (Z = -4.6406, p-value = 0.0001) and retained prawn catch which was no significant difference inprawn catch between BRD and control nets (Z = -1.9218, p-value = 0.0546). Therefore, that evidence could be argued to convince about the BRD benefits to commercial prawn trawl fisheries.
Highlights
By-catch is the catch that being an unintended catch of fisheries(Kumar and Deepthi, 2006), such as fish, turtles, marine mammals, and sea-birds
By using bycatch reduction device (BRD), by-catch of trawl were reduced significantly by 22.2%, 12.8%, 31.9%, and 34.8% respectively
Total fish catches between BRD (6.0 ± 1.5) and control (9.4 ± 3.2) nets were significantly (Z = -4.6406, p-value = 0.0001) different where total fish in BRD net was lower than control net (Error! Reference source not found. and Figure 2b)
Summary
By-catch is the catch that being an unintended catch of fisheries(Kumar and Deepthi, 2006), such as fish, turtles, marine mammals, and sea-birds. By-catch is due to a lack of fishing gear to be selective on its target, especially trawl fisheries (Broadhurst et al, 2006). By-catch is becoming a major issue in fisheries management by considering to ecological disturbance of ecosystem balance (Broadhurst et al, 2006; Eayrs, 2007; Lewison et al, 2004), such as unwanted harvest of vulnerable species (i.e. turtle, dolphin and dugong) and predator species (sea lion and shark). The effect of by-catch lately recognized in 1885 which was indicated by the rapid decline of fish stock (Blanco et al, 2007)
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